Rocket Internet and Roland Berger plan ‘super incubator’ (updated)

Both companies will each hold 50 percent of the incubator, Roland Berger’s CEO Charles-Edouard Bouée told German Manager Magazin.

“Our company will work like a factory and will produce one company with a digital business model after another,” he explains.

That sounds pretty much like what Rocket Internet is doing right now. It’s not only unclear in how far the incubator will differ, nor when and where it will start.

The joint venture is part of Roland Berger’s new business strategy.

Update (December 23rd, 2014): This venture aims to become the core of a wide-ranging European digital business network that is open to incubators, investors, technology providers, and other digital players. The goal is to bring together firms of different sizes from different segments to help them form alliances and push digital innovation, e.g. by inventing new business models, and thus support the digitalization of the European business world.

Metahaven is a new kind of graphic design team. This self-styled ‘design think tank’ is such a departure from conventional forms of practice that it is unlikely many designers have heard of them yet, particularly outside the Netherlands. Nor do they go out of their way to provide colleagues with entry points into their concerns and methods. A Dutch design historian who tried looking at their peculiarly awkward website (www.metahaven.net) confessed to me, with good reason, that its fragmentary structure perplexed her. It would be easy to dismiss the team – graphic designers Daniel van der Velden and Vinca Kruk, and spatial designer Gon Zifroni – as arcane experimentalists whose activities have nothing to do with the realities of practice.

On September 17, 2011 thousands of women and men gathered in Zuccotti Park, located in New York City’s Wall Street financial district. It was a day when Occupy Wall Street (#OccupyWallStreet) movement was publicly born, garadually receiving global attention and spawning the grassroots protests against social and economic inequality all over the US. But how did this historic event actually start?The original protest was initiated by Kalle Lasn and Micah White, editors of Adbusters, a Canadian anti-consumerist and pro-environment magazine. The idea was to have a peaceful occupation of Wall Street to protest against corporate influence on democracy, a growing disparity in wealth as a result of neoliberalism, and the absence of legal repercussions behind the recent global financial crisis. They sought to combine the symbolic location of the 2011 protests in Tahrir Square with the consensus decision-making of the 2011 Spanish protests (Movimiento 15-M). Adbusters‘ senior editor Micah White said they floated the idea via their email list and it was spontaneously taken up and it quickly spread online with help from the hacker group Anonymous. The rest is the history.See, and feel, here the full text of this (short) inspiring message – the original email that launched Occupy Wall Street movement.“Are you ready for a Tahrir moment?”- Occupy protesters have been defying the world. Yes, Zuccotti Park encampment was dismantled and demonstrators were dispersed. But I am certain that Occupy Wall Street was not just a moment in history; rather it is the movement of history, it is the history in the making.

Jorge loves his Catgenie automated cat-litter tray, but doesn’t love spending $350/year on “Sanisolution” (perfumed gunk that makes the litter stick to his cats’ feet and gets tracked all over his apartment), but he discovered that the manufacturer uses DRM to stop him from filling the…

we are skeptical towards technological progressivism — the belief, rampant in videogames culture, that technological development is linear and universally positive

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we see contemporary problems in videogames cultures as going beyond negative representations and the entitlement of white male consumer-kings, ultimately connecting to deeper issues around the dominant forms of videogames themselves

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we appreciate, nonetheless, the ability of digital games to facilitate playful relationships between people

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we consider play to be a powerful force for building relationships and imagining beyond our current circumstances

we respect careful abstraction while reminding ourselves that the map is not the territory and that maps are political artifacts

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we build small things in resistance to the fantasy of the perfect simulation and the notion that scale correlates with importance

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we describe polish as poison not out of a romantic appreciation of roughness but because polish is an imperative of capital

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we value the glitch, not as crude aesthetic, but because it disrupts fantasy

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we distrust avatars because they too often function as glorified digital limbs

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we emphasize the giving and receiving of care as valuable functions of digital games and because caring has been marginalized as a form of feminine labour in favor of shocking, disturbing or, at best, enabling the player in the worst possible sense

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we cherish escapism insofar as it is a queer escape that challenges us to imagine beyond the here and now

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we dream of utopic worlds through play in the midst of bleakness — contrary to those who would dismiss our dreaming as a luxury — because it is in the bleakest moments that visions of alternatives are the most necessary

About a year and a half ago, I wrote about a $12 “Gongkai” cell phone (pictured above) that I stumbled across in the markets of Shenzhen, China. My most striking impression was that Chinese entrepreneurs had relatively unfettered access to cutting-edge technology, enabling start-ups to innovate while bootstrapping. Meanwhile, Western entrepreneurs often find themselves trapped in a spiderweb of IP frameworks, spending more money on lawyers than on tooling.